Messi is simply untouchable after hat-trick away at Real Madrid... Barca star has surpassed the great Di Stefano

There will always be a part of Barcelona football club that feels Alfredo Di Stefano should have been a Barca player, that’s why each time Lionel Messi breaks one of the old maestro’s record it feels extra special.

Waking up on Monday morning after Messi had become the first Barcelona player to score a hat-trick in the Santiago Bernabeu, Barca fans knew history had been rewritten.

Di Stefano trained with Barcelona before he joined Real Madrid, playing in several friendlies before finally establishing himself as a Madrid player with the club’s president Santiago Bernabeu snatching him from the Catalans’ grasp.

He went on to score 18 goals in 30 games against Barca. No man had scored more in the fixture until Messi came along and smashed the record – he now has 21 goals against Real Madrid.

Messi is the man Barcelona fans feel Real Madrid simply cannot touch. Real’s president Florentino Perez could probably find the 250m euro buy-out clause but Messi’s emotional ties to the club mean he will never leave for their biggest rivals as Di Stefano did.

The image of him kissing the badge after his third goal on Sunday night appeared on most front pages in the city on Monday morning. ‘Messi destroy’s Madrid’ was Diario Sport’s simple headline.

He had outdone Cristiano Ronaldo whose Balon d’Or triumph in January now seems like a distant memory. The heroics of Barca's No 10 left Ronaldo complaining about an anti-Real Madrid conspiracy that made it feel as if they were playing against 12 men.

Barca fans will argue that owes more to Messi’s presence than to any referee’s.

Becoming the first player to score more than 18 goals in the Clasico fixture is the first of what could be an incredible hat-trick of records for Messi. He only needs five more Champions League goals to overhaul Raul’s record of 71 and become the European Cup’s highest scorer.

And he is 16 goals short of becoming the Spanish League’s all-time top scorer – and all this at just 26 years of age, from a player who has been written off this season as having seen his best days.

The sense of resurrection from both the player and the team added to the delirium that greeted the win on Sunday night. The corpse didn’t just twitch, it got up and started doing cartwheels. Barcelona could have been seven points behind Real Madrid had they lost.

Instead they beat their great rivals to do the double over them this season. And the single biggest reason for that was the Argentine record breaker who belongs to them and not Real Madrid.